Band of Boarders

“Melrose Place” revisited.

If I may extrapolate from my own preferences, television audiences haven’t been hungering to see a remake of “Melrose Place,” a show that’s gone though not entirely forgotten, not because it’s on DVD but because it was so tacky, campy, and idiotic—compelling despite not being interesting—that it stuck with you if you stuck with it. So, although it’s been ten years since the show was cancelled (it had a good run, petering out after seven seasons), anyone who watched it can easily call up its stable of unstable characters and its absurd plot gyrations and romantic pairings. It was nighttime soap opera, brought to you by Aaron Spelling and his then boy wonder Darren Star, who had previously created “Beverly Hills, 90210”—which is also in remake, now airing on the CW as “90210”—and went on to adapt Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” pieces for HBO. (In a real-world Spellingesque twist—unpredictable and yet inevitable—Star and Bushnell fell out when, a few years ago, they came up with shows that were too similar for both to succeed, his being “Cashmere Mafia” and hers being “Lipstick Jungle.”) The current king of the TV jungle is Jerry Bruckheimer, with his dark, death-obsessed dramas; Spelling’s poolside melodramas were replaced by such reality shows as “The Hills.” Turns out you could get that same blend of bad acting, daringly unbelievable storylines, and fantasy for a lot less money by “scripting” it rather than “writing” it. Spelling died in 2006, and a certain kind of grandiosity seems to have gone with him. Last year, his widow, Candy Spelling (mother of Tori, one of the stars of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” who went on to have her own reality show), put their famously spectacular house—at about fifty-seven thousand square feet, it’s one of the largest cribs in the country—on the market, with an asking price of a hundred and fifty million dollars. She’s trading it in for a much, much smaller dwelling—a sixteen-thousand-five-hundred-square-foot condo—in another part of town.

But there’s drama in downsizing, too, and, in any case, “Melrose Place” was not primarily about big dreams or fantasies. It was just one dopey thing after another, done cleverly enough to manipulate you into watching it and kind of loving it, whether or not you liked, or even cared about, any of the characters. I watched the show for most of its run, until the point at which the characters, who lived in the same apartment complex in Los Angeles, had gone through all possible romantic combinations with each other and began repeating them, as if their personal history didn’t exist. See, at that point, you’re not just messing with my head; you’re acting as though I didn’t have a head. That’s where I draw the line. I try, anyway. But watching this random band of boarders was highly entertaining, a “Grand Hotel” set in an ant farm. And then there was the show’s killer app, raison d’être, savior, and organizing force, the angel of melodrama who walks the earth under the name Heather Locklear. Locklear was a genuine pleasure to watch—she always came across as a pro and seemed to have a sense of humor about herself. (When she hosted “Saturday Night Live,” her gameness in sending up her image as TV’s go-to hot blond bad girl confirmed this.) Locklear’s character, Amanda Woodward, was a big-deal advertising executive, and multi-adjectival in her moods and whims: vixenish, kittenish, scheming, vulnerable, generous, determined, sad, charming, vengeful, unneurotic. All that—and a landlord, too.

The old “Melrose Place” was on Fox, and the new one is on the CW (as is “90210,” which precedes the new “Melrose Place” on the Tuesday-night schedule as of this week), and is a cross between a sequel and a remake—a requel—in that the story includes a couple of the old characters but isn’t really about them, and yet the new characters almost completely mirror the old ones. In other words, it’s as fresh as yesterday’s daisy. It’s not entirely unfun, though, to look for differences between “MP1” and “MP2.” No one was texting back when “MP1” was on; now you can set a whole series in motion by having a character receive a message saying “In serious trouble. Come Now!” while he’s in a loud bar playing tonsil hockey with a woman he’s just picked up—he doesn’t have to be sitting at home waiting by the phone. (And the tonsil hockey itself is so much more explicit than it used to be; much as one hates to avert one’s eyes from the TV, for even half a second, sometimes one simply must.) The not very successful writer is now a filmmaker named Jonah, boyishly dogged and boyishly in touch with his inner nerd, looking for green clovers in the Lucky Charms (that’s not a metaphor; he actually does it), and, at twenty-three, his girlfriend says, dubiously, he has “a box of Legos in the closet—that he still plays with.” Locklear’s new counterpart is Ella (Katie Cassidy, who is David Cassidy’s twenty-two-year-old daughter), a junior publicist who doesn’t crumple when her job is in jeopardy. No! All steel, she says, “You better believe some stupid merger isn’t going to stop me from becoming the next Pat Kingsley.” Cassidy has good lines and good timing—but she can forget about filling the stilettos of the Sarah Bernhardt of soaps. The returnees from “MP1” are two big pieces of bad news, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro) and Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton), who were inexplicably central the first time around. Sydney was chaos made human, and Michael was evil and narcissistic (except when he had amnesia) and yet bizarrely attractive to women. The creative twist here is that Sydney dies in the first episode of “MP2”—she’s found dead in the pool—but keeps returning in flashbacks. Crazy Kimberly, one of the original characters, probably won’t be returning—the actress who played her, Marcia Cross, is busy with “Desperate Housewives.” It remains to be seen whether La Locklear will make an appearance at some point. We can only hope.

Already, there is a lot of plot to chew on. (Among the Internet musings is this one, about the parentage of David, a rich, aimless Melrosian: “Kimberly plotted to abduct Jo’s son in Season 3 because the car accident in Season 2 had left her barren. If she had already had a child prior to the beginning of the show, she certainly wouldn’t have abandoned him/her to be a doctor in L.A. It is established that Michael is David’s father and he didn’t even know she was into him until the middle of Season 1, plus Michael used to live in Chicago and Kimberly lived in Cleveland. I highly doubt they crossed paths before he got involved with Jane.”) There’s a lot of generic up-to-dateness. And the patois of our time is given its due in the show’s dialogue: when David is brought in for questioning about Sydney’s death, the detective, noting that he has a record, which includes smashing his roommate’s jaw with a golf club, goads him by saying, “I guess boarding school can get to you, huh?” To which the surly child of privilege responds, “Douche bags get to me.” In the pilot, Lauren, an upstanding medical student, hears the news that her father has been laid off, and, like so many TV characters before her, has to turn to an old, non-medical profession to pay her tuition. Current, or near-current, songs fill the soundtrack; the producers have rounded up some of the usual suspects, such as the Killers and Lily Allen. Over all, the show has a little something, but it doesn’t have outstanding curb appeal, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a foreclosure notice in the window sooner rather than later. ♦